Aspar confirms Ducati split

Spain's high profile Aspar squad will split with Ducati at the end of the 2011 MotoGP world championship and is now working on its own private 1000cc project.

Having initially agreed to expand to a two-rider effort with the Bologna factory in 2012, the Aspar squad confirmed to MCN in Phillip Island today that plans to continue running just one Ducati had also collapsed.

It was only at last month's Motorland Aragon race that rumours surfaced that budget problems meant the Aspar squad, owned by former 125GP world Jorge Martinez, would have to lease just one Ducati GP12 for current rider Hector Barbera.

But talks to lease one bike collapsed just hours before the start of the Twin Ring Motegi race in Japan earlier this month.

Aspar Sporting Director Gino Borsoi said the team was now in negotiations with Eskil Suter about running a Suter/BMW machine, which uses a tuned S1000RR motor.

Borsoi also confirmed that talks had commenced with Aprilia about a project that would use the Italian factory's RSV4 motor.

Speaking to MCN in Australia today, Borsoi said: "We have tried a lot to find a solution with Ducati to run one bike in 2012 but it was not possible to finalise an agreement. It is a complicated story but at the end of the day we didn’t find a solution. Now we are thinking about our own project for CRT and honestly we have only just started this process because this was never our plan."

For more on this story and full coverage of the Australian Grand Prix, see the Octobr 19 issue of MCN.